Pride? Blair should feel only shame onPoppy Day

This Poppy Day I shall find it specially hard to watch our political leaders piously laying their wreaths at a Cenotaph that commemorates men so much better than they.

This Government no longer deserves the loyalty and devotion of the Armed Forces that serve it.

The Black Watch have been sent to the bloody heart of Iraq for political, not military, reasons. Poorly protected and - thanks to Labour and Tory scrimping - badly equipped, they are targets, suffering horrible casualties for no good purpose.

This is not the first time that the loyalty and courage of the British people have been abused. Our soldiers, sailors and airmen have repeatedly rescued politicians from the results of their blunders. But at least on past occasions the danger was genuine, the threat real, the sacrifice justified. Now it is not. And those who pretend to be patriots on the front bench of the Commons do not give a damn for this country, secretly hoping to dissolve it altogether.

The British people, who suffered and died through two major wars in a century, have not been rewarded by their leaders. On the contrary, they now have an elite that despises our past so much it cannot even be bothered to mark the 60th anniversaries of VE and VJ days properly.

On the compromise day set for the commemorations, I half-expect to see a parade of old soldiers walking slowly down Whitehall bearing a simple banner inscribed with the words: 'We wonder why we bothered.'

I suspect most of them went off to war, leaving all that was dear to them, in a way that few today can imagine, with a horrible lump in their throats and the thought in their minds that at least they were ensuring that their children and grandchildren would be able to grow up British in a country that would be recognisably their own.

In this they were utterly deceived. And now those grandchildren are being asked to fight in a war that is not ours, does not serve our country or help our people, and which was started on a tide of untruth. I am reminded of Kipling's stinging couplet about politicians of long ago: 'I could not dig, I dared not rob, therefore I lied to please the mob. Now all my lies are proved untrue and I must face the men I slew.'